Lethal Lightning

Thunderstorms Can Be Both Beneficial, Deadly

July 07, 1993|By BOB BLATTNER Daily Press

It made a decent television commercial, but it's a pretty stupid thing to do in real life.

In the ad, an attractive young woman, home alone and frightened during a thunderstorm, calls her mother for comfort. "That's exactly what you shouldn't do," says Jerry Stenger, a climatologist at the State Climatology Office in Charlottesville. "In fact, one of the particularly dangerous features of working in the state climatology department is whenever there's a thunderstorm people call you on the telephone."

Lightning is electricity, a deadly dose. Phone lines are designed to channel electricity.

Chances are, you've already given some thought to thunder and lightning during the past few weeks. Crashes and flashes at 2 a.m. tend to have that effect.

This was an unusually active spring for large-scale thunderstorms in Southeastern Virginia, says Chip Knappenberger, another climatologist who works with Stenger in Charlottesville.

"You've been hit heavy," he says. "I can't really tell you why."

Severe storms are related to cold fronts, he says. "It seems like we've had a pretty good number of fronts this spring. The cold, dry air pushes the warm, wet air up."

Knappenberger predicts the big storms should tail off now that it's summer, when we're likely to see more frequent, but smaller, thunderstorms. It rains about one day in three during Virginia's summers, he says, and thunderstorms are responsible for most of that rain.

In summer, the jet stream retreats north into Canada, pulling with it the organized cold fronts that trigger the thermonuclear-scale thunderstorms of the spring. Summer thunderstorms here are local yokels - detonated when warm air mixes it up with cooler air over sun-heated areas.

At any one time, about 2,000 thunderstorms are roaring away over the globe, Knappenberger says, about 44,000 a day. Each storm, on the average, logs about 100 lightning strikes. For all that flash, Americans fare pretty well in the survival column.

Lightning causes only about 100 deaths each year in the United States, compared with 120 in tornadoes, 100 in floods and about 50 in hurricanes in an average year.

Whatever the odds, Edwin Kessler isn't about to stand under a tree when the thunderheads gather. As retired director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma and author or editor of more than 200 publications on heavy weather, Kessler's made storms his life's work.

That lifelong study has left him more in awe and wonder of thunder and lightning than in fear. All in all, Kessler says, thunderstorms benefit mankind, and all life on earth, far more than they hurt it.

In fact, most scientists will tell you that lightning caused life on earth; that repeated jolts of electricity into the primordial oceans hundreds of millions of years ago formed the complex organic compounds, such as amino acids, that became the building blocks of life.

But forget using lightning bolts to power industry or breathe life into Frankenstein's monster. Kessler says it's just not worth it.

A typical lightning bolt is made up of pulses of dozens of individual flashes no more than a few millionths of a second in duration each, Kessler explains. Even if the technology were there to harness that, he says, the value of the electricity collected would maybe total a few dollars, maximum.

Still, Kessler says, the beneficial rains and cooling that thunderstorms bring more than compensate for all the trees knocked down and forest fires started, the fatal floods and lightning bolts.

Sure, he says, you don't want to stand near trees or on top of mountains during an electrical storm, you don't want to talk on the telephone or take a shower.

Just like telephone lines, plumbing can carry electricty. But he wonders why anyone would want to bathe or chat on the telephone when a storm is firing

away.

"Other things being equal, I think I'd want to look out the window or stand on the porch and watch the storm rather than take a shower," Kessler says. "We live in an age where things tend to be exaggerated, where we have a kind of fascination with technical glitter, an infatuation with form over substance. And I really think it's tragic that so many people seem to fear thunderstorms rather than appreciate them. They do do damage, but their benefits far outweigh the damage - far, far, far, far, far. They are God's work, and we should appreciate them."